How to speed up Eclipse on OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

May 28, 2010 by Inteist

If you’ve been experiencing horrendous performance of Eclipse on OS X, or maybe you even did not know that Eclipse actually can run very fast, you’d be surprised to learn that apparently it is very easy to make Eclipse run 4-5 times faster  on OS X with proper settings to your eclipse.ini file.

First I will give you a bit of  background. If you want the gist of it or how to make it fly – just go the end of the post.  So a few days ago, PSU fried on my main desktop development machine. It is a newer Quad Core i5 2.6 machine with 4GB 1066Mhz memory and a standard 7200 RPM drive. Since the machine is dead and I am waiting for a replacement power supply, I had to move to my new and shiny MacBook Pro, which I have recently purchased and which is from the latest batch of the updated MacBooks and is quite powerful. It is also i5 (only dual core though) with the same 4GB of 1066Mhz memory and 5400 HD.

So, yeah, I would say that the systems are pretty close right. Nevertheless, working with Eclipse on OS X felt horrendously slow! I had already noticed this nuance in the past and I thought that the Eclipse is just not meant to fly on Mac-s (oh well…), especially when there are so many different distributions for OS X, it signals that the project is in a shifting phase basically (it is shifting from Carbon to Cocoa) and that you should expect all kinds of problems.

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Motorola Droid driver for Windows 7 64 bit

May 23, 2010 by Inteist

I’ve got the Motorola Droid from Google through their device seeding program a while ago. Which is nice although Nexus One would be much better since then I would have been actually using as my phone. The Droid has to be tied to Verizon and I am a T-Mobile lad all the way.

Anyways, I’ve tried a few times to get adb debugging talk to my Droid on my Win7 64 bit and I could not get it to work for a long long time. I tried to search around for the solution, but none of the drivers that I’ve found worked until today I started the search again and found the Win7 64 bit Droid drivers from Motorola here which worked perfectly fine!

Don’t forget to go to “Settings->Applications->Development” and enable “USB Debugging”

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Chrome OS and the iPad

May 13, 2010 by Inteist

People that are fascinated by Apple usually don’t look around for other things, they like the polished products that just work. But for other people and technologists it’s not like that. We usually are looking for the best tool for the job. So my point here is that not many Apple fans even heard of Chrome OS. Yes, they probably heard about Chrome browser (and this was very smart move by Google by the way, first to release the browser by the same name for many reasons, but one reason is that people are getting used to the Chrome web experience).

Anyways, the question that I really wanted to address here is: was the development of Chrome OS and the Chromium project in general a response to the iPhone OS thread and the coming (now released) iPad or maybe it was exactly the other way around?

So Google started actively working on the Android OS about 2 years ago while iPhone was already available but doing the first baby steps. The pace of development of Android was quite fast and at the moment these rival operating systems  are somewhat comparable in futures stability and usability. Some are lacking on Android and some are lacking on the iPhone. Last year Google started working on the Chrome OS which is essentially an operating system inside the browser and just about a month ago Apple released the iPad to the public. While there are already a few tablets running on spin offs of Android OS, Google is rumored to be soon releasing its own tablet and what it will run is yet unclear.

Anyway however, it seems that Google is targeting the same space that the iPad does right now with its Chrome OS. Simple operating system. Or is it an operating system and can it be compared with the iPhone OS which is actually an operating system. Very limited at that but still. If the Chrome OS would be the strictly in browser OS it is questionable how it will stack up against iPad. Users are used to having free access to their file system and being able to install software rather than use webapps. In that sense the iPad is revolutionizing and laying out the ground for the change of computing paradigm we got used to so far.

It is not clear what came first (as the concept) and what was developed first but it would be sure very interesting to watch this evolution of computing in the near future.

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How to use Apache 2.0 license in commercial products, explained in simple terms

May 5, 2010 by Inteist

If you were wondering whether you can use  apache licensed code in your commercial applications and what do you need to do in order to comply with the license here’s the unofficial simple ans short answer.

You can use Apache 2.0 licensed source code in your project as long as you include the copy of the license in your distribution and provide attribution in an applicable way in your distribution.

The slightly lengthier and detailed (but still very simple explanation) is below, taken from Apache license FAQ

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